The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

Chapter 9

The Puzzle Pattern Emerges

What you have read in the preceding chapters represents to me the many pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle, one with a pattern that is only now emerging. Three years ago I could see only two or three of the pieces and how they fit together: how the rise of cloud computing was going to amplify the growing power of computer-aided design (CAD) by ushering in a new software paradigm that will make wide-scale collaboration easier.

In the course of pursuing that vision over the 40 months or so since, I have come across a new piece of the puzzle almost every other month—and observed the momentum that is quickly aligning them to create (what is to me at least) the antithesis of the perfect storm. The wonder of that is what motivated me to write this book.

Forgive me if I have blown my own company’s horn too often along the way, but it was hard to tell this story without describing why I was in a position to witness it. I hope that my account presents a clear, logical, and persuasive picture of the forces converging to reorder the way we design and make physical objects.

If all this seems obvious, it has not been until very recently. Even from the Olympian heights of GE’s boardroom, the full scope and significance of what is just over the horizon was only becoming apparent in the fall of 2013.

We are on the verge of a revolution that is going to quickly and radically transform the way physical goods are designed, manufactured, and marketed—and how their ...